Handled the Ball - The Cricket Blog

Monday, 3 August 2009

Sometimes I love twitter. When I have not been next to the TV or radio, I have been able to follow the ashes by watching the feed of my friends' twitter updates (I am @marcwestius), and not only do you get frequent updates, you get all sorts of colour in the form of personal opinion. Of the Ashes cricketers, Graham Swann, Jimmy Anderson and Phil Hughes are on twitter, with Hughes notably informing us of his sacking before the Edgbaston team was announced. By the way, does anyone else think that it is completely NOT in the spirit of twitter for Hughes to send his messages to his agent, who then sends them to "the IT guy" in India to update the twitter stream? Hardly fast-paced microblogging!

Anyway, one of the cool things that twitter does is aggregate opinion on various topics. By using a hashtag, status updates can be pooled by subject. One the best topics recently is #ashesrumours, started by @FollowTheAshes. There are some common themes, here are some of the best so far:

on the same flight that david boon drank 52 cans of beer, geoff lawson drank 52 west coast coolers

Wednesday, 22 July 2009

With England up 1-0 after 2 Tests, can Australia fight back? Or is the momentum now against them? They fought back from 1-0 down in 1997 in England, but that was a vastly different team. Have a vote in our poll - we'll shut it down just before the 3rd Test to capture what people are thinking at this stage of the series.

It comes as little surprise for this generation of players. Test cricket is a long cruelling game of stamina and can quite easily take it’s toll on the body, so it’s natural to understand why players like Flintoff who has struggled with injuries throughout his career would clearly look to find a way of extending it. Having a long career in cricket can be very lucrative these days, with all the money from the IPL it has never been a better time to play cricket.

In fact, the pay difference between playing test cricket and Twenty20 cricket is so great, that it’s getting to a point where Test cricket is actually becoming a bit of liability.

The reality of the situation is that, unless you’re Australian, playing Test cricket can actually cost you money. Only Australian’s have voluntarily omitted themselves from playing in the IPL, this year Ricky Ponting, Michael Hussey, Michael Clarke and Mitchell Johnson were all high profile players that chose to make themselves unavailable for this competition – in fact Clarke and Johnson have steadfastly avoided even being a part of the draft process entirely. Is it really just a coincidence that these players are actually the top 4 money earners under lucrative Cricket Australia contracts?

Cricket is one of the world's most statistical sports, and mathematicians in cricket-loving nations love nothing more than delving into the minutiae of the numbers and diving into averages, strike-rates and custom-made measures of batting and bowling effectiveness.

For many people, including me, cricket isn't just a sport, it is a way of life.

These words could easily have come from me, but are actually the words of Rob Eastaway, a cricket-loving mathematician from the UK, and originator of the official International Cricket Councilcricket-ratings which rank not only teams, but players within each team. In this podcast, I chat to Rob about how you mathematically rank cricketers.

Every cricket season, the TV coverage of cricket becomes more spectacular and technological, with the introduction of microphones to detect the finest of edges through to the keeper, improved abilities to determine the trajectory of a ball once it has left the bowler’s hand, and now even heat sensors to see how the batsman sweats.

But the scientific aspects of cricket are not limited to TV companies, with science playing an increasing role in shaping the performance of players, from their general fitness to specific training techniques for both their physical, and possibly more importantly mental, well-being. It is with science that countries are aiming to find the competitive edge.

The recent news of the great Indian batsman Sachin Tendulkar surpassing West Indian Brian Lara's record number of test runs has given maths-loving cricket geeks another opportunity to pull out their calculators and Excel spreadsheets. At the time of writing, Tendulkar had scored 12,027 runs across 247 innings, to overtake Lara's 11,953 from 232 innings. After a little investigation, I found that despite his outstanding average of over 54 runs per innings, Tendulkar's most common score in test cricket is ... zero! Even the great Don Bradman scored a duck more times than any other score. And their next most common? One! We look at how are cricket scores are distributed.

Do you need to be fit to play cricket? Do the best batsmen in the world really have the ability to predict the type of ball they will receive before it even arrives? And is cricket really more of a mental game than a physical one?

In this podcast episode, we talk to Dr Rob Duffield from the School of Human Movement at Charles Sturt University who has found that indeed you really do not need to be as physically fit to play cricket as you do other sports such as football. We also chat to Dr Allistair McRobert from Liverpool John Moores University whose work has shown that the best batsmen can predict to some extent where a bowler will bowl. This work encompasses a look into the subconscious mental game of cricket and how the most successful players are more mentally prepared for the top level than lesser players. More on this topic can also be found in our article The Science of Cricket.

Tuesday, 14 July 2009

I love this clip of former Australian cricket Damien Fleming on the comedy show Thank God You're Here, the Australian theatre-sports style show which essentially aims to embarrass celebrities. In this challenge, as Australian sportsmen tend to talk a lot about things they don't know, Fleming was set the challenge of marketing the Australian Synchrotron. His opening line, "choosing the right sub-atomic particle analysis facility is a little bit like medium pace bowling" is brilliant. Check it out below or on the youtube video:

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About us

Nick was captain of the indoor cricket teams The Spice Boys and Backnet Blitz and was robbed of a maiden outdoor century when he was "timed out" after showing up late to the second day's play. A muscular all-rounder, Nick could turn his gaze to other sports, and completed the baseball dream of a grand-slam home run.

Marc managed to score nearly all his career runs in 1998 before he discovered going out on a Friday night. His top score is 114 for Glenorie vs Mt Colah, and the stars somehow aligned for a best bowling performance of 5/12 for the Illawarra Catholic Club. He has also been hit for 22 off a fantastic 9 ball over, and has yes been out "Handled the Ball" (oh, and hit-wicket).